LIBR is exceptionally pleased to announce that Drs. Justin Feinstein, Kyle Simmons and Kymberly Young have been awarded NARSAD Young Investigator Awards from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation!

The projects that received funding support from the foundation are:

Justin Feinstein, Ph.D.: "Examining the Neural Basis of Interoceptive Fear"

Kyle Simmons, Ph.D.: "Interoceptive Learning and Recall in Major Depressive Disorder"

Kymberly Young, Ph.D.: "Clinical Trial of Real-Time fMRI Amygdala Neurofeedback as a Depression Treatment"

CONGRATULATIONS to the awardees!

http://bbrfoundation.org/yi

Kym Young Ph.D. has received a five-year career development grant to investigate a new neurobehavioral treatment for major depressive disorder.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the leading cause of years lived with disability worldwide. Traditional pharmacological and/or psychological interventions are ineffective in up to one-half of patients, and treatments (such as electroconvulsive therapy, vagus nerve stimulation, and deep brain stimulation) available for severely ill patients who do not respond to standard interventions are invasive, and potentially associated with significant side effects. Therefore, there is a need to explore and develop novel non-invasive treatments, which is the goal of Dr. Young's grant.

LIBR researchers Maurizio Bergamino, Ph.D. and Han Yuan, Ph.D. were awarded a Trainee Travel Awards to The ISMRM meeting in Milan. The stipend will consist of a waived registration fee to the annual meeting plus a money award to help defray expenses for attending the Joint Annual Meeting ISMRM-ESMRMB in Milan, Italy, May 10-16, 2014.

LIBR investigator and Director of Cognitive Neuroscience, Patrick Bellgowan Ph.D., receives a four year grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The purpose of awarded study is to investigate the neurobiological substrates of trust behaviors, particularly as they relate to cyberspace. Understanding the neurobiology of cybertrust will accelerate and enhance the development of precautionary and remedial methods for online risks. Using an investigational cyberspace simulation platform, the proposed effort combines a novel multivariate neuroimaging approach with behavioral and biological markers to build a multimodal non-fMRI biomarker of cyber trust propensity. The multivariate neuroimaging methods developed in this protocol will aid in future analyses of neuroimaging data in mood disorders studies. 

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common mental health problem that leads to great suffering as well as significant costs to the people afflicted with this disorder and to society. PTSD is a chronic and disabling problem that develops after a trauma. People with PTSD suffer from problems controlling several types of emotion, including fear, anxiety, anger, and depression. The risk of developing PTSD is higher in the U.S. military than in the general U.S. population with about 19% of people in military suffering from this problem during their lifetime. By employing a team of experts in a wide range of areas of study, this research aims to improve treatments for veterans and people in the military with PTSD resulting from combat.

The research team will investigate a new idea that individuals suffering from combat-related PTSD can be trained to control activity in brain regions that are involved in emotion. This increased ability to control emotion-related brain areas will reduce PTSD symptoms. Researchers also will use novel research techniques termed real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging neurofeedback (rtfMRI-nf) and electroencephalography (EEG), which will allow them to analyze brain activity as it occurs. And then they will able to show people information about activity in the brain as it happens, which helps them learn to control it.

The goal is to transform this novel research and technique into a treatment that can be easily deployed and will improve the treatment of combat-related PTSD and the mental health of our veterans and people in the military both in the short- and long-term. This research would provide both mental healthcare providers and scientists with new insights into how the brain is involved in combat-related PTSD.

LIBR Investigators receive a four–year R01 collaborative grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study interrelationships between inflammatory transcripts, genes and positive valence system function in anhedonia. Jerzy Bodurka, Ph.D., Program Director for the grant will lead the team of scientists from LIBR, the University of Tulsa, the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, and the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. The goal of the proposed research is to assess gene transcription from white blood cells, imaging measures of brain function and behavioral assessments of reward responsiveness along a dimension of anhedonic mood symptoms. Researchers will attempt to prove that inflammation plays a major role in the onset and perpetuation of the reduction in pleasure and motivation that many individuals experience in the clinical conditions that currently are subsumed under the diagnostic categories of depression, other mood disorders or chronic fatigue. The team hopes to identify an abnormal pattern of gene transcription and brain function that will be sufficiently distinct from the normal pattern that it can be used to objectively establish a diagnosis based on biology, as opposed to self-reported symptoms, and that this diagnostic category will predict the likelihood that an individual with this disorder will benefit from particular types of treatment.

Dr. Alvarez has received the Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. His study aims to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the effects of mildly painful stimuli that are predictable or unpredictable on emotion and pain reactivity in depressed individuals compared to healthy controls. Major depressive disorder (MDD) is highly co-morbid with anxiety disorders and chronic pain conditions suggesting that common brain systems may underlie these illnesses. Studies in humans and animals suggest that increased anxiety during the anticipation of unpredictable or uncertain threats may rely on a different brain system than that which is engaged during the anticipation of predictable or imminent threats. Fear responses to predictable threats appear to involve a brain system centered on the amygdala, whereas anxiety responses to temporally unpredictable threats are hypothesized to involve a system that includes the amygdala and a neighboring brain structure called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. Both of these brain regions are capable of influencing emotion and pain processing, and are subject to the influence of brain activity in other areas such as medial prefrontal cortex. Knowledge concerning the specific brain pathways involved in pain and emotional responsivity in MDD will aid in the understanding of how these pathways are altered in the illness and may be reversed with proper treatment.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the leading cause of years lived with disability worldwide, and yet relatively little is known about its underlying biological causes.  Dr. Simmons has received a 5-year grant from the NIMH to study the neural systems underlying depression and, in particular, changes in appetite and feeding behavior that characterize MDD.  It is important to understand these aberrant feeding behaviors in depression as they may both engender risk for serious physical illnesses such as obesity, metabolic syndrome, and type-2 diabetes, and may also clarify the different biological bases of MDD.